Beautiful examples of hand-painted walls that will inspire you to get the paintbrush out
Most of us feel that we've achieved quite a lot if we manage to wrangle rollers and masking tape and paint our walls in one colour, but imagine how much more exciting it would be to paint something beautiful and one-off onto the walls of a house? Not only does a hand-painted decoration make an interior absolutely unique, but it can also create an atmosphere in the way that few other decorative elements can, whether it's playfulness and whimsy in a child's room or a sense of ethereal magic in a dining room. There is no limit on the kinds of effects you might achieve, and hand-painting doesn't have to be only for serious artists. We've seen simple trims around the borders of rooms and geometric designs that would lend themselves well to stencilling, so don't be put off if you're not overly adept with a paintbrush. And if it goes wrong, you can always paint over it.
Dean Hearne1/10Botanical artist and set designer Tattie Isles has turned her west Dorset cottage into a magical place for her children to grow up. This dining room (once the boot room) doubles as a craft area for the boys, and is suitably inspiring thanks to a floor to ceiling mural of the Dorset landscape painted by Tattie using tester pots of paint.
‘I had a plan to make a structured, Swedish-inspired mural, but I then just thought I’d make it wild and looked outside for my inspiration,’ explains Tattie. ‘It’s all apple trees, hills and the birds and animals that surround us. I love the idea of the inside looking like it belongs on the outside.’
Ruth Ribeaucourt2/10This 18th-century house in the Brittany town of Port Louis is home to Jean-Baptiste Martin and Vincent Farelly, founders of decorative paper company Antoinette Poisson, and has been sensitively restored by them with an eye to its past. The hallway features hand-painted trees by Vincent on the traditional wood-panelled walls.
Christopher Horwood3/10Artist Natasha Mann has used her Edwardian home as a canvas for her hand-painted designs, which are inspired by the biomorphic and geometric designs used in Moroccan interiors. In most rooms she has painted an intricate border between the wall and ceiling – in the sitting room it is an Art-Nouveau-inflected style. ‘I enjoy living in a house that is my own creation and is not constrained by any particular style or fashion,' she says.
Owen Gale4/10Children's rooms are a great place to experiment with hand-painted walls and details. In her former London home, designer Alice Palmer painted a fun bunting detail around the ceiling of her kids' bedroom, echoing the pattern of the Indian embroidered kanthas from Sourced by Holly.
Dean Hearne5/10Designer Meta Coleman has taken things a step further in her daughter's bedroom at her Utah house, with hand-painted murals of sweet characters inspired by the daughter's love of Japanese art and animation. The landscape style of the painting means that it's not overly intense, with a largely sky blue background against which the characters pop.
Michael Sinclair6/10Hand-painting a ceiling is not for the faint-hearted, but it can be absolutely spectacular. In this Kensington house, decorator Lucy Hammond Giles commissioned an ivy-wrapped latticework motif for the vaulted ceiling of the basement dining room. Painted by the decorative specialist Magdalena Gordon, of Atma Decorative Arts, it sits above four crescent-shaped slivers of verre églomisé, which give the whole scheme a super sophisticated feel at night.
Paul Massey7/10Another hand-painted ceiling we adore, this time from novelist Andrew O'Hagan's London house, decorated with the help of Jane Ormsby Gore. Over the dining area is a hand-stencilled ‘sky’ of painted beams by the artist Tony Roche, inspired by the magical ceiling of St Francis of Assisi’s Basilica in Italy.
Paul Massey8/10Meanwhile the kitchen of Andrew O'Hagan's house is enlivened by another of Tony's murals, this time inspired by Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
Dean Hearne9/10For artist Rachel Bottomley, moving to this cottage on the Surrey-Hampshire border was an exciting opportunity to spread her creative wings, and much of the interior now features her art. In the entryway, she made use of the beams to paint pretty flowers using tester pots from the Beata Heuman X Mylands new paint range.
Simon Brown10/10The blue-and-white scheme of this dining room in interior designers Philip Vergeylen and Paolo Moschino's cottage is based on the eighteenth-century painted French screen that hangs on the wall. The hand-painted blue design is 'deliberately not like wallpaper', and Philip worked closely with the artist Dawn Reader to create this effect.
